Word: tenoritis
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...both a perfectionist and a born showman, as his status as cultural icon was sealed by unprecedented duets with rock and pop music singers, from Bono to Stevie Wonder to Celine Dion. Some opera purists will never forgive the tenor for these Pavarotti and Friends performances, which he acknowledged in one of his final interviews last year with Italian journalist Ettore Mo. "There were polemics because I'd thrown myself into a completely different genre," Pavarotti noted. But in the same interview, just a few months after cancer surgery, Pavarotti was counting his blessings. "I am and have been...
Audience members at the Metropolitan Opera looked at one another in amazement. Did we just hear what we thought we heard? Onstage, the strapping young Italian tenor singing opposite Joan Sutherland in The Daughter of the Regiment had just trumpeted a ringing high C, then another, and another. He was singing an aria that most tenors transpose down a step, in order to get by on B-flats (tough enough). But this fellow tossed off every high C in the aria with astonishing ease and brilliance - nine in all. The effect was electrifying. Within a day the Met box office...
...That was in 1972. The tenor was Luciano Pavarotti. For a decade he had been building an international operatic reputation as a real comer. Now, with those high C's at the Met, he announced that he had fully arrived. Virtually from that moment until he died this week of pancreatic cancer at 71, he reigned in the public mind as the primo tenor - make that the primissimo tenor...
...Pavarotti was unquestionably the most celebrated and most exciting tenor in the second half of the 20th century. Was he also the best? Here a definition of terms is in order. Some tenors ranged more widely through the repertory. Pavarotti concentrated on the classic lyric roles in such works as La Boheme, La Traviata and Madame Butterfly, and in later decades, when his voice turned darker, added more forceful roles like those in Tosca and Un Ballo in Maschera; but he rarely ventured into ruggedly dramatic territory, and almost never sang in any language but Italian...
...Still other tenors displayed more refinement and style, and brought a richer cultural or intellectual background to their roles. A case in point: Domingo, the other dominant tenor of the era, a more consistent, versatile and rounded singer than Pavarotti and a far more affecting actor (a domain where Pavarotti's skills remained, to put it kindly, rudimentary...